Online Fundraising
Services Offered
Working with smaller to medium sized charities I develop internet marketing and online fundraising strategies for a range of clients.
Fundraising related services offered include:
- Developing strategy and setting realistic objectives
- Online marketing strategy development and building fundraising campaigns
- Developing strategies to build relationships with supporters over time
- Implementing donation gateways and other fundraising tools
- Measuring and learning from the performance of fundraising campaigns, building upon success and future proofing campaigns
About Online Fundraising
Online fundraising consists of a series of interconnected strategies that begins with building an awareness of what you do.
You then need to sufficiently engage your audience so that they feel compelled to take action.
Typically this involves building relationships with supporters over time and moving them up a ladder of engagement.
Strategies to promote your message to a wider audience include online marketing, enhancing online engagement, making it easy for your audience to take action and integrating online and offline activities.
Other tactics such as social networking and cause related marketing are becoming increasingly significant.
Once people actually reach your site a well thought out site structure and engaging and up to date content are essential.
Online fundraising is not just about encouraging people to make donations online, it is also about the development of potential donors and the management of existing supporters over time.
For example, getting people to sign up via your website for a newsletter enables you to build up a relationship with a potential donor. Similarly, relevant and up to date online activity can keep existing supporters informed and limit attrition rates and are essential to the development of an online donor stewardship plan.
Accepting Donations Online
A payment gateway is necessary to actually take donations online. In choosing a donation service it's important that it is easy to use and that it can capture additional information such as whether donations include Gift Aid or whether the donor wishes to receive updates from the charity.
Additional factors to consider include costs, flexibility of the service, reporting facility and customisation available.
Organisations differ in their requirements and so certain services maybe more suited to a particular charity and less so to another.
As well as direct donations the use of social fundraising tools such as JustGiving or the Facebook Causes application are increasingly important and can be highly effective.
Read more / Articles on this site
Internet Fundraising - Getting Started
Fundraising during a downturn (Dec 2007)
Other useful articles and resources
